Disabled the built in admin account that Plex was installed under and now I need to manually start Plex after NAS reboots under my user account. I have upgraded the server twice and still see this error. Is there somewhere I can edit or do I need to delete and reinstall?
there are no errors I can see in the NAS logs or Plex once it’s running and I don’t see any errors anywhere. This started on the first reboot after disabling the admin account Plex was installed under.
QNAP doesn’t like having the master account disabled — as you’ve learned.
We have no ability to use anything other than ‘root’ (which you see as ‘admin’) due to the QNAP SDK.
Recommendation: Turn it back on and make a strong password with 14 or more characters which include upper and lower case letters, digits, and punctuation.
I kinda guessed that but now QNAP is telling us to disable the account for protection. I opened a ticket with QNAP to ask this question and I will update this post with their answer.
This note was in the last firmware update:
QTS now enables the default “admin” account and resets its password when users press the Reset button on the NAS for three seconds. Nevertheless, to ensure device security, we recommend disabling the “admin” account and using a new administrator account after you finish resetting the system.
Synology does that too. However, Synology gave us another account to use.
QNAP doesn’t.
The vast majority of users actually sign in as admin (for when performing maintenance tasks) and use the NAS as mapped drives / mounted folders otherwise.
I can discuss with QNAP and team here but if we create something and become non-standard, it is going to break everything in the QNAP environment for everyone.
I will probably just go back and reactivate the admin account that already had a complex password and 2FA once I hear from QNAP.
I’m not internet facing with the NAS so my attack surface is low. It would be nice for QNAP to have a better strategy for disabling the admin account for Plex and other software in the future.
Thanks for your prompt replies. I really enjoy Plex and the support on here.
I even have access restricted by geography and fail2ban running on my portal. Must be the pages of attacks in my logs and the glut of QNAP ransomware going around making me paranoid. LOL!
I think that ransomware is what is making QNAP sensitive too.
They’re likely trying to get people to be smarter because they know people will download viruses then blame QNAP because of their own bad practices.
I also have restricted geography but given this is a stateful firewall (pfsense), there is no reply to pings / attempts which aren’t a) expected or b) allowed as incoming.
